Breakfast for dinner night...

We're still pluggin' along with creating the gifts and I'm quickly running out of room and storage containers to hold all these Christmas goodies! We're getting anxious to get the packaging going so we can start figuring out how to fit them all in the boxes to ship out on Monday. Tomorrow looks to be quite a busy day as we will be dealing mostly with the more labor intensive chocolate parts (dipping, barks and whatnot) and hopefully decorating cookies if we get to them.

Mainly because I was looking for something quick and easy to eat, I went the route of making breakfast-for-dinner for our meal tonight. I've frozen most of the cranberries that we've stocked up on over the past few weeks, but I had just enough fresh leftover in the refrigerator to throw together a batch of these Cranberry Pancakes.

Since the pancakes take just minutes to cook, the cranberries are first dunked into boiling water for a couple minutes to soften them - this also makes chopping them much easier as they won't bounce around! To give the pancakes a little texture, yellow cornmeal is added to the dry ingredients. You can use either coarse or fine grain cornmeal depending on how much crunch you want in the finished pancake. Instead of adding nuts, we used a little walnut oil as the fat for these - this adds a pretty subtle nutty flavor, but it is probably not a pantry staple and is a little on the pricey side; you could just as well use canola oil. Since these light pancakes were not too sweet, I served some warm pure maple syrup at the table to play off the fresh bursts of tartness from the cranberries.

Recipes
Cranberry Pancakes